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Gavin Newsom shown up by judge for secret order to ban key energy resource in California

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Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent years making it harder to produce oil in his state, and Californians are picking up the tab in the form of America’s highest gasoline prices.

Now a Kern County judge has delivered a rebuke to one of his administration’s most brazen anti-energy schemes: It secretly imposed a statewide fracking ban, denied its existence for years, then invoked environmental justifications contradicted by its own earlier findings.

In an Oct. 8 tentative ruling, Superior Court Judge Bernard Barmann Jr. invalidated both the administration’s secret prohibition on fracking, imposed in 2021, and the formal regulation adopted in 2024. \

The ruling is a legal embarrassment for Newsom and an indictment of California’s increasingly arbitrary approach to energy policy.

The story begins in 2019, when Newsom told disappointed supporters that he lacked authority to impose a fracking moratorium. “You can’t do that unilaterally,” he said. “Legally, you cannot. The governor of California cannot do that.”

Apparently, he reconsidered. 

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In 2021, after legislation to ban fracking failed in a Democrat-controlled Senate committee, Newsom’s office quietly directed the California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, to stop approving well-stimulation permits.

But getting his regulators to carry out his order was another matter. 

In 2019, Newsom fired state oil and gas supervisor Ken Harris amid complaints that his agency had approved too many fracking permits.

Harris’ replacement,........

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